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"It's the HIV-negative taboo," says Tom Moon, a gay San Francisco psychotherapist. "It comes across like advocating support groups for white men, as if we are saying the most privileged need help."

But in a sign of rising attention to uninfected gay and bisexual men, Moon and others in San Francisco are launching a private program this month to grapple with the social and psychological issues involved in being both gay and HIV-negative.

The Invention project, which has won the endorsement of AIDS groups, is designed to prevent the further spread of the virus.

It's called the "Good Dog Project," a whimsical, poignant title stemming from surveys asking gay men what they want from life. The answers: a good dog, a nice apartment, true love, a life that doesn't revolve around

HIV.

An upbeat approach&lt;

Both new projects are sending a similar, if confounding, message - it's OK to be negative.

"Every day we're told, "Just get on with your lives, you should feel lucky, you should thank God,' " says Dr. Joseph Brewer, a San Francisco psychotherapist and founder of Invention. "We are expected to be on the sidelines in a family with a sick child, to keep quiet, to go about our business because the focus needs to be on the sick child. But we are all suffering.

"Our style is to be upbeat, to seek the joy and hopefulness that we can find. We want color and sparkle, we want to counter the gloom. . . . We will attend the sadder issues of grief and loss, (but) we have to start building new relationships, new forms of community that are supportive of staying healthy."

Future topics will run the gamut from "Positives and negatives: Can we come together?" to "When is it OK to throw a man out of bed?"

The two new projects mark a natural progression in the epidemic's course, observers say.

"It's like a rose with the petals opening up. We're learning more about the needs of HIV-negative men," says Derek Gordon, spokesman for the AIDS Foundation, the oldest and largest AIDS organization in San Francisco.

"There's a maturation that's happening," he says.

"We're saying we want you to think about planning to be old, to think about rocking chairs and gray hair and retirement plans."

After more than a decade of tending sick friends, of burying loved ones, of fighting to build relationships amid the fear of infection, those seem impossible concepts.

Rather, gay men in the 1990s - especially for those under 30 - carry a woeful sense of inevitability about eventually contracting HIV, says Dr. Walt Odets, a clinical psychologist in Berkeley and author of a just-released book on HIV-negative men, "In the Shadow of the Epidemic."

"They kind of aspire to staying free of AIDS, but it doesn't really seem possible to them," Odets says.

In turn, many older gay men, fearing infection, are isolated in celibacy, he says - or locked into their own sense of hopelessness.

"We are treating HIV-negative men as if they were on the same continuum of health, and they are not," Odets fumes.

"It is absolutely necessary, if we are really going to reduce the number of infections, to address the concerns of those who are negative."

Additionally, the Stop AIDS Project holds workshops for some 1,200 gay and bisexual men a year - 80 percent of them uninfected - to discuss, among other subjects, how AIDS has affected them and what triggers unsafe sex.

"A lot of HIV-negative men are coping admirably well," says Dan Wohlfeiler of the Stop AIDS Project. "They've stayed safe, they've figured out how to survive in the midst of an ongoing terrible epidemic. All of us, whether negative or positive, have clearly been affected by the epidemic. I've heard one psychologist put it well: "I'm coping very well, but that doesn't mean I don't feel like I've been kicked in the head.' "

Illogical though it is, for some, being virus-free is not incentive enough to avoid the "fatal relapse" into unsafe sexual behavior, say health care experts.

Indeed, data from the San Francisco AIDS Office show that more than 650 gay or bisexual men are seroconverting annually, a troubling increase from 250 cases in 1987.

Moreover, a recent survey of 7,859 men by the Stop AIDS Project found that a third of those who'd had anal sex in the previous six months had engaged in unsafe practices.

"Some gay men have lost the sense that it is important for them to stay negative," says Dana Van Gorder, coordinator of lesbian and gay services for The City's Department of Public Health and a founding member of Invention.

"They see HIV-positive men living longer lives of quality," he says. "It seems to have eroded the sense of the importance of staying negative. We've done so much to care for HIV-positive men; they have access to a lot of services, social support. It has caused some HIV-negative men to feel disenfranchised, to believe that there are advantages to being positive - more services, more social support."

"We are all on the same path'&lt;

With 50 percent of San Francisco's gay male population infected, many negatives have also reached the implausible but heartfelt belief that they are somehow betraying the gay community by being virus-free.

Clinicians call it survivors' guilt, but to Ed Wolf, that term is an irritating misnomer.

"I certainly haven't survived, and this horrific epidemic isn't over yet," says Wolf, 46, a health care worker and founding member of Invention.

"Being involved in AIDS is like being on a long, difficult trip," he says. "There are voices in this epidemic that say that those who don't have the infection are not on the path. But we are all on the same path. Some of us have it, some don't. . . . This is not a game of comparative suffering. I can't measure my pain against yours. But we are all in it together. We are all affected, we are just not all infected."

Inescapably, though, there are stark differences between positives and negatives.

"Say you're at a dinner table and everyone is talking about AZT," Wolf says. "It is hard to talk about the future when, understandably, most of the conversation is about illness. Everything you say seems petty. But the truth is, my life is not petty. I'm a middle-aged gay man, and the issues I face in my daily life are not trivial."

Overhanging the new HIV-negative projects is a sharp worry that the work will be viewed as divisive.

"We are not trying to make HIV-positive men feel we are trying to write them off," says Van Gorder.

"HIV-negative men have a unique set of cultural and psychological issues. The epidemic is only part of our lives. We owe it to ourselves to have a life beyond this." &lt;